Includes bibliographical references (pages 524-546)

American Political Science Association Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, 1967

Part One: Revolutionary origins of capitalist democracy -- I. England and the contributions of violence to gradualism -- Aristocratic impulses behind the transition to capitalism in the countryside -- Agrarian aspects of the Civil War -- Enclosures and the destruction of the peasantry -- Aristocratic rule or triumphant capitalism

II. Evolution and revolution in France -- Contrasts with England and their origins -- The noble response to commercial agriculture -- Class relationships under royal absolutism -- The aristocratic offensive and the collapse of absolutism -- The peasants' relationship to radicalism during the revolution -- Peasants against the revolution: The Vendee -- Social consequences of revolutionary terror -- Recapitulation

III. The American Civil War: the last capitalist revolution -- Plantation and factory: an inevitable conflict? -- Three forms of American capitalist growth -- Toward and explanation of the causes of the war -- The revolutionary impulse and its failure -- The meaning of the war

Part Two: Three routes to the modern world in Asia (Note: Problems in comparing European and Asian political processes) -- IV. The decay of imperial China and the origins of the Communist variant -- The upper classes and the imperial system -- The gentry and the world of commerce -- The failure to adopt commercial agriculture -- Collapse of the imperial system and rise of the warlords -- The Kuomintang Interlude and its meaning -- Rebellion, revolution, and the peasants -- V. Asian fascism: Japan -- Revolution from above: the response of the ruling classes to old and new threats -- The absence of a peasant revolution -- The Meiji Settlement: the new landlords and capitalism -- Political consequences: the nature of Japanese fascism

VI. Democracy in Asia: India and the price of peaceful change -- Relevance of the Indian experience -- Mogul India: obstacles to democracy -- Village society: obstacles to rebellion -- Changes produced by the British up to 1857 -- Pax Britannica 1857 -- 1947: a landlord's paradise? -- The bourgeois link to the peasantry through nonviolence -- A note on the extent and character of peasant violence -- Independence and the price of peaceful change

Part Three: Theoretical implications and projections -- VII. The Democratic route to modern society -- VIII. Revolution from above and Fascism -- IX. The peasants and revolution -- Reactionary and revolutionary imagery

Chapters discuss the growth of capitalistic democrary in England, France, and the U.S., and the rise of both democrary and repressive forms of government in several nations of Asia

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